First woman-cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova
Photo: Dmitry Lekay
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World First Woman Cosmonaut Speaks About Error of Vostok Designers
Vostok-6 Spaceship was ascending instead of descending from the orbit because of some error in the control program, World First Woman Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova said when interviewed by Rossiiskaya Gazeta. By request of Soviet spaceship designer Sergey Korolev, Tereshkova had kept secret for dozens of years.
The spaceship almost flew “there” instead of the Earth because of the error, Tereshkova said, specifying she noticed the fault on the first day of the flight and reported it to Korolev. The mistake was promptly repaired – Tereshkova entered the data that she got from the Earth into the descending program and landed safely.
It was designer and researcher Evgeny Shabarov that first spoke of the accident three years ago. “I kept silent, but Evgeny Vasilievich decided to make it public. So, I can easily talk about it now,” Tereshkova explained.
The landing wasn’t the comfortable one. Under the regulations of that time, a cosmonaut ejected himself/herself from a spaceship at the altitude of seven kilometers, and Tereshkova hardly missed the lake because of the violent wind. After the landing, the wind was blowing off her parachute, and Tereshkova had a big bruise on the nose before she managed to free herself from it.
www.kommersant.com
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